{"id":2006,"date":"2011-05-20T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2011-05-20T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/2011\/05\/prescription-drugs-kill-300-percent-more-americans-than-illegal-drugs.html"},"modified":"2011-05-20T08:00:00","modified_gmt":"2011-05-20T12:00:00","slug":"prescription-drugs-kill-300-percent-more-americans-than-illegal-drugs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/2011\/05\/prescription-drugs-kill-300-percent-more-americans-than-illegal-drugs.html","title":{"rendered":"Prescription Drugs Kill 300 Percent More Americans than Illegal Drugs"},"content":{"rendered":"The war on some drugs has failed.\nLocking up people for marijuana while oxycontin is legal makes no sense.\nLocking up huge numbers of people for private profit at taxpayer expense\nwhile schools are getting defunded makes even less sense.\n<p>\nDavid Gutierrez wrote in Natural News 10 November 2008,\n<a href=\"http:\/\/www.naturalnews.com\/024765_drug_drugs_DEA.html\">\nPrescription Drugs Kill 300 Percent More Americans than Illegal Drugs<\/a>\n<blockquote>\n<a href=\"http:\/\/www.narconon.org\/drug-information\/oxycontin-information.html\">\n<img decoding=\"async\" style=\"float:right;border:none;\"   src=\"http:\/\/www.narconon.org\/drug-rehabilitation\/oxycontin-use-addiction.jpg\"><\/a>\nA report by the Florida Medical Examiners Commission has concluded that\nprescription drugs have outstripped illegal drugs as a cause of death.\n<p>\nAn analysis of 168,900 autopsies conducted in Florida in 2007 found that\nthree times as many people were killed by legal drugs as by cocaine,\nheroin and all methamphetamines put together. According to state law\nenforcement officials, this is a sign of a burgeoning prescription drug\nabuse problem.\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>\nIs this just in Florida?\n\n<!--more-->\n<blockquote>\nFlorida pays careful attention to drug-related deaths, and as such has\nsignificantly better data on the problem than any other state. But\na recent study conducted by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA)\nsuggests that the problem is indeed national. According to the DEA,\nthe number of people abusing prescription drugs in the United States\nhas jumped 80 percent in six years to seven million, or more than those\nabusing cocaine, Ecstasy, heroin, hallucinogens an inhalants put together.\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>\nAnd if you want to put somebody in jail:\n<blockquote>\nMany experts attribute the trend to the increasing popularity\namong doctors of prescribing painkillers, combined with a leap in\ndirect-to-consumer marketing by drug companies. For example, promotional\nspending on Oxycontin increased threefold between 1996 and 2001, to $30\nmillion per year.\n<\/blockquote>\nHow about drug company executives.\n<p>\n-jsq\n<p>\nPS: I found the article on Michael Hendricks&#8217; facebook page.\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The war on some drugs has failed. Locking up people for marijuana while oxycontin is legal makes no sense. Locking up huge numbers of people for private profit at taxpayer expense while schools are getting defunded makes even less sense. David Gutierrez wrote in Natural News 10 November 2008, Prescription Drugs Kill 300 Percent More [&hellip;]","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1113,41,19,72,20,178],"tags":[2581,77,8730,4527,4525,4526,1297,82],"class_list":["post-2006","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cca","category-health-care","category-history","category-incarceration","category-law","category-vlcia","tag-deaths","tag-drugs","tag-incarceration","tag-mortality","tag-oxycontin","tag-pharmaceuticals","tag-private-prison","tag-war-on-drugs"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p585fK-wm","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2006","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2006"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2006\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2006"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2006"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2006"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}